Blogging live from IMPACT last week was an interesting experience. It felt like taking photos at a party. Instead of being part of the party and interacting with other people, I was stuck behind the computer screen trying to think, type, edit and format all at once. It did not allow time for analysis. I've decided interactive podcasts are the way to go, so I caught up with Beth Smith, VP WebSphere Solutions and Tooling at IBM Software on Thursday. Beth has a long list of BPM announcements. Check it out below.

Listening to all the announcements Beth shared, and listening to Steve Mills last week telling 4000 customers that SOA is the answer to their business requirements for better business agility, one thing came through loud and clear. IBM totally gets SOA, and they are investing heavily in making their customers successful with new tools and services. Contrast that to HPs announcement last week that SOA is now ready for prime time (one announcement vs. entire corporate strategy). While that's good news, it is hardly at the level of IBM telling all it's customers that SOA is the answer and the path to business transformation.

I also compared Mill's remarks with what Microsoft has told me over the past year. Last June, they started a briefing by asking me if I agree that SOA is another buzz word and we're just about past it so Microsoft can sit this one out. I think my jaw dropped when I heard that. In my view SOA has been a known best architecture practice for two decades and the wide support of standards have finally lowered the risk of adoption. In other words it's a must have. When I last caught up with Steve Sloan of Microsoft last December he told me that Microsoft has not talked much about SOA and is "still getting the organization to line up behind use of term."

The breadth and depth of the SOA vision that IBM demonstrated truly impressed me. And now that I'm no longer blogging live, I can better appreciate the impact of IMPACT. I think Steve Mills, who has built up the software division to 40% of IBM profits, is really a rock star. He has the vision right and IBM is making the commitment and investment to ensure that their customers can succeed with SOA - through tools, services and industry solutions. I think it's exciting times in the industry when we can talk about vision and commitment instead of product features.

Listen to or download the entire podcast with Beth Smith below:

Download file

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Last live post from Impact. Now listening to Manoj Saxena, Vice President, Industry SOA and Brett MacIntyre, Vice President, Composite Business Services. At Impact IBM announced a number of business services being released. The idea is to create pre-built parts to use in consulting engagements. This is an asset based engagement to lower the risk of service based projects. The services IBM has announced are:

These pre-built solutions are available as part of consulting engagements. These are higher level services that are meant to be SOA accelerators. These are high level business level services. Instead of applications, they are pre-built business services.

This is the relationship of how the services - the IP - runs in the Service Fabric.

There are a lot of questions as to how customers consume these services - are they software? Do customers get the license? Actually, these services are being sold as services - that means they account as service dollars - not software dollars. Customers also have the option to choose a maintenance agreement that will allow them to get the license to change the code. The underlying platform, Fabric, is based on IBM's acquisition of Webify.

Average cost of these pre-build business services will be between $400k - $1 million. There are currently 4 services available:Banking Payments, Telecom Operations, Insurance P&C, and Healthcare Payer. The 4 new ones IBM has announced are Automotive Quote and Home Quote for the Insurance industry and Hi Beam -Member Essentials and Enrollment To File Benefits for the Healthcare –Payer & Provider industry.

This session was full and elicited many questions. While the session is going to be held over, I've got to sign off now and run to the airport. Hope you enjoyed being brought into this conference.

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Listening to Mike Rhodin, General Manager, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software, and getting a new appreciation of the implications of Web 2.0. I think Web 2.0 is the new definition of the generation gap. Those of us over 40 are used to document centric collaboration - creating documents and sending them around for comments. The 20-30 somethings are more used to people centric collaboration. Rhodin calls this the generation of the cell phone. This is a type of interactive ad hoc collaboration but you know who you’re talking to on the other side. The next generation - the Facebook generation, are more comfortable with community centric collaboration.

This impacts the way we will develop interactive applications.

WebSphere Portal Server directiona for the second halve of 2007 will focus on blending back end operational capabilities with the cool now user interface capabilities. IBM is now doing experimentation with what he called a "Mashamatic " what we have been calling mashup IDEs. Rhodin said he is not sure yet whether this will become part of WebSphere Portal or will become a new product. But IBM certainly recognizes a market need.

Lastly, Rhodin mentioned the upcoming release next month of Lotus Quickr, which will be IBM's answer to MicroSoft's Sharepoint.

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IBM announced the introduction of the IBM Rational Asset Manager at IMPACT 2007. The Rational Asset Management (RAM) is a registry of design, development and deployment related assets,. RAM also integrates with WebSphere Servvce Registry and Repository (WSSRR) and Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMD)

This slide shows how the 3 repositories integrate. RAM is used in development, WSSRR is used for runtime governance, and Tivoli CCMD is used for management, such as exception handling. It is clear that many organizations will end up with multiple repositories and will face integration issues. Unfortunately, at the present time there are no standards to easily enable this - it's point to point integration.

In the future, one thing we'd like to see are governance solutions, similar to what IBM in doing with business process solutions and frameworks. FileNet has a great workflow tool and governance is a people based process. Seems like a good next step, as governance is a process, not a technology.

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I barely needed my double soy cappuccino this morning. IBM started their Global customer conference off with a loud bang, including a Stomp-like performance by Rhythm Nation. 4000 people in the room. Another 4200 online for a simulcast in Second Life. It's a big event (very evident when 4000 people all left the ballroom at the same time - maybe bumping into walls and falling off cliffs in Second Life would have been easier). And it's all about SOA.

IBM has been investing very heavily in SOA and it is clear here that it is central to the future strategy of IBM - not just lip service to the latest buzz word. It is clear, listing to Steve Mills, Sr. VP and Group Executive of the IBM Software Group, that IBM sees SOA as part of the overall shift to business driven IT. Citing some results of a survey of 700 CEOs worldwide, he said that 87% expect fundamental change in their business in the next 2 years, 78% believe innovation requires business and technology, and 75% said they don’t know how they are going to make the change - they do not believe they have the ability to support change. The theme of the morning keynotes was clearly that SOA is an enabler of change. Moreover, Mills stated that unlike other shifts there are no clear industry or geographic leaders.

IBM is addressing this at a number of levels - from a business view, ensuring clients understand the business view of what SOA enables. About 8000 are hearing that message today. IBM also announced some education initiatives. Sandy Carter, VP, SOA and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, showed SOA Sandy, her Second Life alter ego, who gave a short tour of IMPACT in Second Life. She hinted about some special jewelry, but clearly those second lifers have much more time than I do.

Carter also demoed Innov8 BPM Simulater, a game (which also looks very Second Life-ish) meant to teach BPM at universities. IBM is working with 58 universities in 20 countries to implement a Service Science curriculum. She also announced IBM's virtual university with certification in basic and intermediate SOA.

In additional announcements IBM made today is developing content and services to accelerate the adoption of SOA including industry specific roadmaps, business blue prints, SOA industry framework, and SOA professional services. IBM will also be delivering this with partners and expects to grow from 3600 partners going to 10,000 partners. IBM also announced new software aligned to SOA entry points (more about this later) and new and enhanced software for BPM and Registry.

In an effort to post this while continuing to hear more about the story I'm going to post this now, and continue more posts later. If you're interested, check out Second Life and let us know your experience.

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For the second podcast in our continuing BI in Action podcast series we spoke with Frank Pursel, Senior Prinicipal with HP's Information Management Practice, where Frank serves as the competency leader for business performance management; Gaurav Verma, who is the Business Intelligence Marketing Manager of SAS; Karl Kwong, Product Manager at Business Objects, where he focuses on driving the adoption of BI in operational and mission-critical systems; Arman Eshraghi, CEO and Founder of LogixML; and Tobin Gilman, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Hyperion Solutions, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Frank Pursel spoke about how BI is becoming much more pervasive throughout the organization. “We have the executives looking at dashboards, score cards, trending type of information. We have analysts that are using pretty much the same type of applications they did before, but with more advanced features. We also have field people who are looking at mobile analytics, they are also looking at quick, almost real-time type of data. And then we also have operational folks that are looking for alerts and again more real-time type of information.”

Guarav Verma of SAS agreed that BI is becoming more pervasive throughout the organization. He also stated that end users are moving from structured periodic reports to more advanced statistical analysis, forecasting and modeling. He stated as SAS, a market leader in BI, sees the marketing starting to mature it is starting of offer BI vertical solutions that include offerings include domain expertise and intellectual property. The other emerging trend he noted was the inclusion of BI in processes.

Karl Kwong of Business Objects spoke of a push away from analytical systems to delivering BI to a more operational set of users as part of the existing business processes. The integration of BPM and BI is clearly an emerging trend we are hearing more and more. Business Objects is creating a new service tier that focuses on integrating into business process.

Arman Eshraghi of LogiXML spoke about making BI broadly available throughout to all levels of operational users by providing browser based systems that are easy to use, learn and integrate.
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Tobin Gilman, of Hyperion Solutions, recently acquired by Oracle. Tobin stated that going forward everything will be Oracle, the Hyperion brand is likely to be dropped. Hyperion focuses on business performance management. One trend Tobin mentioned was the merging of BI tools for reporting and analysis with packaged applications and performance management applications. The result is accelerated planning cycles, forecasting cycles and closing cycles for reporting both statutory and management reporting.

It is clear that BI is becoming more pervasive at all levels of the organization. To hear more about how these vendors view the evolution and future of BI tune into the podcast.

Be sure to tune into the BI in Action virtual conference on June 20 to hear Bill Gassman, Research Director, Gartner
speak about how BI is Driving Business Performance.

To learn more about how BI is evolving tune into the keyone on une 21st to hear Boris Evelson, Principal Analyst, Forrester.
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Leading up to the ebizQ BI in Action Virtual Conference (June 20-21) we have been speaking with a variety of vendors - big vendors, small start ups, pureplay BI vendors, BPM vendors incorporating BI into their solutions, and platform vendors who offer a one of everything. We are asking them what they are doing to embed BI in BPM and SOA soutions. You can listen to these podcasts at the BI in Action site.

The focus of the first podcast was about what vendors are doing to integrate BI with BPM. The panelists were:
Luke Liang, Chief Executive Officer of InetSoft Technology
Maria Ross, Corporate Marketing Director, Savvion,
Lothar Schuvert, Director of SAP NetWeaver Solution Marketing
Jim Hare, VP of Product Marketing and Business Development, Cognos On-Demand
Marc Andrews, Program Director of Data Warehousing, IBM

A common theme was enabling real-time operational level BI, alerting business managers to potential problems and issues as they are occurring, rather than reporting that they happened at the end of the month. In fact, BI and BPM is what delivers the business value of SOA. Maria Ross put it well when she said, “BPM is the context, BI is the content.” BPM delivers business time operational BI.

InetSoft Technology is focusing on business plan execution through operational BI. Savvion, A BPM company which included dashboard analytics early on, focuses on the role of BI in improving performance management through business process optimization. Savvion also integrates with BI tools to deliver BPM with BI. Lothar Schubert of SAP spoke about delivering intelligent collaborative solutions, and the role of BI in these solutions and best practices for delivering real-time operational BI. Jim Hare of Cognos, a pure-play BI vendor, spoke about planning, understanding, and managing operational performance by monitoring activities and metrics and taking action when there’s a problem. This requires the information getting pushed to the right place, in a desktop widget.

Listen to the BI in Action podcasts series.

Do you agree? Do you see an expanding role for BI within your organization?

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Yesterday I tuned into a conference being simultaneously webcasted from MIT called H2.0. It stands for human 2.0, and focused on the Media Lab's research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability. It was all about how humans will integrate with technology to heighten cognition, emotional acuity, perception, and physical capabilities. In fact, the research is about using technology to help those with handicaps such as amputees, autism, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. But as John Hockenberry, who hosted to program, pointed out, a number of technologies that started out as aides for disabled have become mainstream, including the typewriter which was originally developed to help the blind and the phone which was originally intended to help the deaf.

My first impression was to think of analogies to Web 2.0. Interestingly H2.0 also used similar adjectives as we use for Web 2.0 such as agility and adaptability. But they were talking about the human ability to adapt. Indeed it was difficult to think of some of the presenters as disabled as the research who makes computer aided prosthetic limbs showed his competitive advantage in rock and ice climbing, and the super model showed her amazing designer legs. She stated that among models she felt the artificial prosthetics she uses to walk are far less than many of the ones other models have implanted in their body.

I was particularly interested in work being done in Ed Boyden’s neuro physics lab because my son, a graduating senior, is now working in the lab and will be doing his graduate work there starting in June. He is developing tools to affect the neural circuits using lights. Molecules are sensitive to light and they are looking for ways to use light to both drive the firing of neurons and shutting them down. This research is applicable to epilepsy and Parkinson’s. Maybe someday everyone will have light boxes that will help us remember where we put our keys, or people’s names when we randomly meet them on the street.

If you have a bit of time, check out H2.0. If nothing else it’s inspiring to think of how technology can dramatically improve lives.

When I think about the work were do, we also think about how humans interact with technology to improve at least their work lives. BI in Action is all about how people interact with technology to get the right information and metrics at the right time to improve their decision making, efficiency and effectiveness.

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Mashups and composite applications, new types of Web 2.0 applications enabled by SOA, are inspiring a new breed of development environments (IDEs). These new tools accelerate the implementation time by reducing coding and simplifying deployment.

Skyway Software’s visual workplace is the example of one such tool. Skyway takes the approach of interactive prototyping to capture business requirements in a model that then generates the solution.

Skyway Builder is used to prototype, design and build applications. It shortens the development cycle by using iterative rapid prototyping. The model can generate AJAX code, to enable the design, generation and deployment of interactive composite web applications. Skyway Director then generates and deloys the application. The Skyway solution enables non-Java developers to easily build composite applications. To learn more about the recent Skyway release, tune into Gian Trotta’s First Look Podcast.

I also recently spoke with Corizon which takes a different approach to building mashups. Corizon creates what it calls UI services. These services reside in Corizon’s runtime environment called Composer. Essentially this crates a UI abstraction layer which offers the flexibility and agility of not having the UI specifically tied to the underlying service. This enables developers closest to the business problem to create the UI and IT to control and maintain the back end services.

The Corizon Platform includes a studio for extracting and building UIs and a runtime for deploying them. While the architectural concept behind the product provides agility (does anyone remember multi-tier client server) usually there is a tradeoff between agility and scalability. Corizon assets that their runtime is highly scalable and can support hundreds of users going against multiple back end services.

Both Skyway and Corizon focus on a new breed of interactive SOA applications. While the business drivers of providing an IDE that will accelerate deployment of applications and enable non-java programmers, those closer to the business with a better understanding of the requirements, to create these new types of Web 2.0 applications. But they take very different approaches.

Check them out and let me know what you think. What would your dream mashup IDE do?

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